The Giving Pump
Gas prices are crazy, but this post is just called that for fun. It’s all I could think of.
“First thought best thought”, came to mind with it, the chunky chestnut I remember a litigation attorney friend telling me (coincidentally, perhaps generationally, so did my priest friend in college) as we tried to write poetry together and co-operatively witnessed him descend into alcoholism, get on the teetotal wagon, and return to willfully unrecognize me at the watering hole we irregulared. Been a little over ten years now. I hope he’s okay. Similar note: (seen just last night) Nicholas Ray’s Knock on Any Door’s “Pretty Boy” Romano, played by John Derek, opines “Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.” Spoiler-free spoiler: he doesn’t live by it.
StupidVision
Not one myself for announcements, save my own gestalts—the moment you do ONE, a dollop of stress gestates and missing any similar from then on is just unnecessary neurosis—so touch and so go. C’est la vie it’s me.
The following is not a complaint since I’ve spun that wheel that already, instead a combination, a bemoaning endorsement, a flare; The Academy Museum slated a slather of classic VistaVision pictures….. and, gulp, One Battle After Another, in the Summer into Fall season. Thank you Academy, thank you a few small beers. Fiver a ticket… holy suckamoley.
VistaVision was and always will be a lunkering, prestigious, luxurious blunderbuss, and now a permutated status symbol for the elite clubhouse, rather than a standard. It must be plugged often that it was as much of, if not more, a gimmick at the time as it is now, an acrobatic of desperation to get asses (and yes, assholes) away from home television and into the seats. And people know less how to use it now than back when nobody did. If it’s screenings, I mean, I love it even if I don’t go, but it’s always those movies. I get it. But if 20 whatevers often surrenders at least one uncommon or two, OK. I guess that’s to trick us whatevering complainers.
Tension between the TV and the movies is far extinct, or at least one thousand percent more assimilated, but what about streaming you say? Back then, TV programming itself was the bunk, but it was the most exciting bunk, so it won anyway. A distinction is that Television was to be explored and shaped, but streaming is just sorting the sock drawer into a different drawer. Repeats.
It’s usually in so many words convenience versus whatever-it-is, and in a “Tissue Society”, like Stella Adler once called it, if it’s disposable it will be done. I’m reminded of Leo McCarey’s Make Way For Tomorrow, a movie that suggests we now all follow dozens of false individualisms that abandon heritage while not building new ones.
Re-center. On the VichyssoiseVision menu, I could scarf any of them with the best, but I’m quietly nodding at those dustier than the others, like Artists and Models, given Jerry Lewis uncommonality screenings. There were a few Jerrys at New Beverly not long ago, maybe they do in some irregularity I don’t know about but Fuck Tarantino and the New Beverly, so.
Broken News
Ted Turner, one of the core fellows responsible for, among countless imperceptible everyday reasons (for just about everyone), the splintered, denaturing of my brain, passed away last week. I confess that checking in on him was not one of my hobbies so alas, I had thought he’d been bench pressing daisies ages ago.
As a wean, not long after the Fam’ got satellite television, I saw the Gap-Toothed eccentric himself on one of my back and forths, Turner Classic Movies (I was young enough that it was just on and I didn’t watch it much before I switched back, a classic Commercial Break evasive maneouvre), and it wasn’t for years that it would be clear to me that the other forth and back, Cartoon Network, was also his fault. Slight shiver saying this, but he “raised” me, when I wasn’t at the babysitter Nickelodeon. Or watching the kids from Stranger Things being reared and raised before my eyes decades later. Well not that, but you know.
Intrinsically if you are a billionaire, there’s corpses you walk on that bear your name, but optically, and in other ways, he was one of the most powerful people to speak out on things people in his position wouldn’t normally. He backtracked sometimes but nonetheless…. the jury heard it. He emphasized, to much expense, Buffalo conservation, which scores with me. Not too much plot on this note: he was a manchild who got a lot of money and put it on shit he loved as a kid. Richie Rich Rosebud. Compare to Elon Musk. I know.
It’s also all gratitude to CNN that I was able to see this in the wild, Live, when I worked at a fitness center:
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh those summer nights walla walla wwalla!
One time I auditioned for Grease. I didn’t get the part I wanted, and it was around that time where I couldn’t be normal about anything. Well, the buck stops here on that one.
A Real Announcement, from all natural me. CALM crazy about loving movies is embarking this summer into affordable, low budget evil, with a selection of Forgotten Film Noir and other B-grade pictures. In some cases this means, in every sense of the word, Double Features. It may be worth your while to sit up straight and bum a smoke, and when the smoke clears it may have what’s coming. Or not, I’ve been sinister when it comes to promises lately.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qj_brNdQW1m_X4csKle97ljR5Ao9p4P_gcOMUsaDS50/edit?usp=sharing
Each summer I like to fantasize The Perfect Summer, tinkered to me. Senility… Vanity… call it what you must.
Most of my gone summers were occupied with Total Work—we were poor (I was poor, more importantly), so the free-ist summers were the youngest, before age conscripted me to work in the fields of Nebraska at $5/hr. Later, an iron/steel works assembly line for a chonky rate of $7. A lumber mill for about the same. One had to do the dreaded School Sports to escape this cycle. This of course meant that you were in the Summer Training chain gang.
Yes I did, and suddenly my time was so free I could do nothing, because training spayed the spirit. No other kids were around either, everyone was working. Nebraska summers were rough. Another job was shingling a house, and by 8am it was 95F. The boss on this project, who was one of my teach’s I gave particular nuisance too, had not reason to go easy on me. Sure enough, someone else on our team was also a teacher, one who never deserved my delinquent wrath, agreed it was abusive cruelty. My remaining summers were TV, Movies, and Games, which is kind of badass, but I eventually reckoned with that they lacked Normal summer stuff.
But it was, I suppose, due to one post-happy-hour bus ride home, watching the city whizz by as I listened to the Hailu Mergia and the Dahlak Band reissue that year (atomic) unspool their dog gone grooves, that at that time, was transportative. I remember this! Well no, it was more min-maxing. The link was also O.C. and Stiggs, primarily the Robert Altman movie but I’d consumed the entire chronicles in National Lampoon. The portraiture in both, though there is a gap wedged by the film’s adaptation, are that of a duo so organically symbiotic it carved a Crazy Horse of jealousy in me. They were far from friends at the time of casting, but you wouldn’t know it.
I do miss those careless days of tetherless hobbyism hermitage, getting home from conditioning with a yogurt to watch Dawson’s Creek in the basement before dawn even broke. But sometimes I think, what if I had a friend then. Loll.
Kingdom Come
A Lately. The fray I’m passing through is the casual polishing an oft un-opted (until now, and sometimes) watching goal, namely the films of Henry King. This has proven a flea in the dog.
Henry King, in some oversimplification, is The wizard of the Americana picture. This bars D.W. Griffith because our “conception” of Americana lies in figures King, John Ford, where the former was the Ultimate Nostalgia-logian, while the latter double are more firmly in the “past-present”. Henry King particularly mastered the posterity genre, not as a goal mind you, long before such a term were coined (or chump changed). He’s another one of those guys with “over 100 movies” and “started when D.W. Griffith did” and “became Catholic later”.
Plenty to cud, though the main issue is the marginal amount around is only quality that’s not very fun to watch. Most of Henry King’s residency was in 20th Century Fox, you see. Bootleg digital only, barring some miracles like The Gunfighter, The Bravados, and Song of Bernadette in High Definition. Devotees, of course, like myself, will suffer suffer suffer, and suffer, any venially to mortally wounding scourges of spent time scouring, and the usual bad A/V.
So “whatever”. I part in radiant contentment..